Years ago in Georgia, he ran as a conservative outsider against the establishment favorite -- and nearly succeeded

If the Republican primary is now a Mitt Romney-vs.-Herman Cain contest, Romney has an ace up his sleeve: One of his top advisers has run a winning campaign against Cain before.

Not many in politics can make that claim. In his only real previous try for elected office, Cain ran in Georgia's 2004 GOP Senate primary, coming in second to now-Sen. Johnny Isakson.

Back then, Romney strategist Stuart Stevens was a consultant to Isakson. Of Cain, Stevens recalls: "He scared the heck out of us."

Cain's 2004 candidacy positioned him to the right of an establishment candidate distrusted by the base, particularly on social issues. Sound familiar?

Stevens is not surprised to see Cain's pitch resonating the way it is at the moment. He's seen Cain's appeal up close before.

"I like him a lot," Stevens said. "I like anybody who gets in this process for a reason and has fun."

Though Cain lost by a 2-to-1 margin, 53 percent to 26 percent, those numbers don't tell the real story of that 2004 race.

Cain came out of nowhere: a virtual unknown banking on his business background, his message and his ability -- honed as a paid motivational speaker -- to hold audiences in thrall. And he very nearly forced Isakson, who was supposed to have it in the bag, into a humbling runoff.

"Had he understood politics a little bit more, had he started a little bit earlier and done things a little bit differently, he would be the United States senator from Georgia now," said Atlanta-based Republican strategist Tom Perdue, who supported Cain in 2004 but didn't work on his campaign.

Perdue believes the 2004 race was a vital political education for Cain.

The former Godfather's Pizza CEO went into that race "naive about politics," thinking he could command the political arena like he did the world of business. He came out of it with a better understanding, Perdue said.

"He learned from his mistakes," Perdue said. "That doesn't mean he's going to be president of the United States. But he learned, and that in itself tells you that he's a smart man."

Though Cain is commonly depicted as a political novice who's more or less lucked into his current position topping several national polls, he's not the newcomer he once was, Perdue said. Cain knows now, as he didn't then, that personal charisma and attractive ideas aren't enough -- you also have to be able to organize at the grassroots level, and you have to raise money.

The Senate race pitted Isakson, at the time a member of the House of Representatives, against another sitting member of Congress, Mac Collins, who also sought to outflank Isakson on the right.

Cain got in the race later than those two. As he does now, he styled himself as the rock-the-boat outsider against the career politicians. As he does now, he trumpeted a bold, regressive and probably unfeasible tax plan -- back then, it was the "fair tax" national sales-tax proposal.

"One thing you could say about him even then is he was bold. He was thinking outside the box," said Dave McCleary, who got to know Cain as vice chair of the Fulton County Republican Party at the time. He is now the Georgia state director of Cain's presidential campaign.

McCleary recalled seeing Cain speak at GOP events in 2004. "I was impressed not only with his speaking ability, but with his sincerity," he said. "Politicians tend to be a little shallow, but Herman Cain was extremely sincere. It didn't matter whether you were the waiter or the CEO, he spoke to everybody the same."

Both Cain and Collins saw their best chance in attacking Isakson for not opposing abortion strongly enough.

Though Isakson said he believed in just three cases where abortions should be allowed -- rape, incest and to save the life of the mother -- Cain and Collins believed in only one exception, for the life of the mother.

Many in the state's active Christian right were willing to give Isakson the benefit of the doubt until, in the middle of the campaign, Isakson voted in Congress to allow members of the military to get abortions at overseas military hospitals. That sent social conservatives into an uproar. Georgia Right to Life jointly endorsed Cain and Collins.

In another potential parallel with the current campaign, the social conservatives' anybody-but-Isakson ploy only furthered the right's inability to settle on a single candidate -- and probably ended up helping Isakson.

Cain was the first candidate to air TV ads, seeing the need to boost his name recognition. He was also the first to go negative.

"There is a big difference between me and Johnny Isakson, and it is not just the color of our eyes," one of Cain's ads said. "I believe in life from conception. Johnny has voted pro-abortion 14 times."

Isakson responded with a TV blitz that didn't attack Cain directly but decried "false, negative campaigns." His campaign sent a mailer that accused Cain of being on the same side as Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy when it came to the Iraq war.

Though Stevens, the Romney adviser, declined to talk in detail about the 2004 campaign, his firm's website cites it as a case study in successful political engineering.

The strategy: "Develop strategic plan based on financial discipline. Do not answer every charge. Let opponents spend money on the air and hold off on television advertising. Strike at high volume before primary to boost numbers, position as the conservative choice -- keep opponents at bay to win over 50 percent of vote to avoid run-off."

Despite the claim of "financial discipline," Cain's unexpected surge forced Isakson to spend $4.5 million on the primary. Cain spent less than $3 million, including nearly $1 million of his own money.

More than anything, the race established Cain as a political up-and-comer in Georgia.

In the ensuing years, Cain would become a force in the state's conservative politics through his Atlanta talk-radio show. Activists tried to recruit him to run for various state offices, including governor, lieutenant governor and Georgia's other U.S. Senate seat, held by Saxby Chambliss.

Cain may have given Isakson a scare, but there appears to be no bad blood. The senator praised Cain earlier this year, telling the Daily Caller he was "a very articulate guy" with "a good business background."

Cain, Isakson noted, "was underestimated" in the 2004 contest: "It was a three-man race, and the incumbent congressman who ran against me finished third."

McCleary, Cain's state director, said the campaign is in the process of opening a second Atlanta-area office and plans to use the area as a base to make a big play for the South, including Florida and South Carolina.

"To this day, Johnny Isakson and Herman Cain are very good friends," he said. "I saw the two of them at a political barbecue over the summer."

Most Popular

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.